August 21, 2015
The Right Reverend Jordan Cantwell
Moderator, UCC
3250 Bloor St. West, Suite 300
Toronto, ON M8X 2Y4
Nora Sanders
General Secretary, UCC
3250 Bloor St. West, Suite 300
Toronto, ON M8X 2Y4 Canada
David Allen
Executive Secretary – Toronto Conference
65 Mayall Avenue, Toronto, ON M3L 1E7
The Reverend Bryan Ransom
President – Toronto Conference
65 Mayall Avenue, Toronto, ON M3L 1E7
Dear Esteemed Colleagues in the United Church of Canada,
I am writing on behalf of Rev. Gretta Vosper. Gretta is a friend and colleague. I am a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA). I host a radio program, Religion For Life, and Gretta has been a guest twice.
I am writing in hopes that you will be an advocate for Rev. Vosper. I have nothing to say about polity and process within the United Church of Canada, of course. What I wish to write to you about is larger than Gretta, you or I, or our respective denominations. I wish to write about the intellectual future of Christianity and the importance of ministers like Gretta Vosper as they fearlessly present to us the issues we face.
What are these issues?
We live in a universe that is 13.75 billion years old. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is a pale blue dot in the suburbs of a galaxy that is one of billions. Humans have evolved through a process of natural selection. We share a common ancestor with all of life going to back to single-celled organisms from perhaps three billion years ago. It is an incredible universe that science is unfolding before our eyes. Yet religion with its ancient creeds and symbols is still in a pre-modern era.
All of the symbols and doctrines of faith from creation to eschatology including “God” are products of a pre-modern era in which humanity was “created” around 6000 years ago in a garden in the midst of a geocentric universe over which Father, Son, and Holy Ghost could be imagined as real entities existing in real time and space. These doctrinal formulations are little more than poetry today.
As one wag put it: Galileo put God out of a home and Darwin put God out of a job.
A supernatural interventionist deity, a god called God, is no more credible than a hammer-wielding Thor scaring humanity with his thunderbolts. By virtue of living in a modern world, we are all a-theists whether we want to admit it or not. No one expects a divine being to send rain, heal diseases, stop the sun in the sky, spin the planets, or cause my team to win in battle or in football, except perhaps fundamentalists.
What we do with our symbols of faith, how we approach them, what we keep, what we reject, what we redefine and reimagine is the responsibility of our generation of ministers and theologians. “God” must be on the table for dissection. That is our task. The one thing that will cripple our work is the silencing of our most creative minister-theologians. This is from American biblical scholar, Roy Hoover:
“Those who insist upon the unaltered retention of traditional forms of religious understanding and language and who retreat from the challenge posed by the actual world after Galileo want to direct the Christian community into the confines of a sacred grotto, an enclosed, religiously defined world that is brought completely under the control of scripture and tradition; and they want to turn the ordained clergy into antiquities dealers.” The Fourth R, Jan. – Feb. 2004
Gretta Vosper and courageous clergy who tell the truth are our last hope for a faith that will have any integrity. You may not agree with the approach that Gretta and West Hills United Church are taking. We will not agree on one clear approach to theology in this time. Agreement isn’t the point. The point is not to punish voices and force people to mouth a wooden formula created in a pre-modern world.
We need ministers and theologians to experiment and to try out new ways of being church. We need ministers and theologians to articulate new ways of doing good in our world. Both our denominations have strong commitments to social justice and ethics. That is the heart of the church. Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity After Religion quotes Harvey Cox:
“Faith is resurgent while dogma is dying. The spiritual, communal, and justice-seeking dimensions of Christianity are now its leading edge….A religion based on subscribing to mandatory beliefs is no longer viable.” p. 109-110.
West Hills United Church and Rev. Gretta Vosper are Christianity’s leading edge. I hope you will consider the larger picture as you reflect on this particular situation. Once we start down the road of silencing creative clergy, then all clergy begin to run scared. Once we do ministry from a context of fear, the love vanishes.
This is an exciting time. The world is watching The United Church of Canada, a denomination that Rev. Gretta Vosper loves and serves. May your church be a leader in exploring a faith for a 21st century mind.
Sincerely,
Rev. John Shuck
Reply
Hello Mr. Shuck,
I’m responding on behalf of Moderator Jordan Cantwell, General Secretary Nora Sanders and Toronto Conference President Bryan Ransom. Thank you for sending your letter regarding Rev. Gretta Vosper.
You raise many good points in your letter, not least of which is your regard for Gretta as a friend and colleague. I experience her in both of those ways too, and am glad of it.
The process we are going through does not have a predetermined endpoint. Our Executive heard many people asking how a minister can say the things Gretta says and still be a minister. Others, like you, have written eloquently in her support. My hope is that at the end of the process, we’ll have a good reason for maintaining her as a minister – or we’ll have a good reason for saying she is not to continue in that role. What we have not done is to pre-judge the outcome and we, like many others, await the recommendations that will eventually come to us.
Again, thank you for writing, and for being a good friend to Gretta.
David W. Allen (Rev.)
Executive Secretary, Toronto Conference
The United Church of Canada
One Response
I wish to support the Moderator’s approach. and the stance of Greta. I have no wish to shut out traditionalist Christians, but I believe it essential that the Churches preserve the freedom of thought as well as the hermetic of experience, so that we are not enclosed into a religious ghetto, but participants in the human conversation that responds to encounter with Life. Worship has become the shared language of Christians but although we often use the same words, we frequently understand the words differently. No culture is now protected from the influence of other cultures (not that they ever were!) and every Christian is now a ‘new Christian’ in as much as our language and our reading of history and the present, see us being both overtly and covertly, engaged by other faiths, other histories than simply the Eurocentric version of Theology and Biblical Studies. Australia’s First Peoples have been developing their Dreamtime Stories for some 40,000 years, and few Australian Churches (and certainly not the Uniting Church in Australia) wish to argue this long experience and collective thinking, has nothing to teach Christians. We are now being freshly engaged by Life (and by God who frequently is obliged to declare “I do a new thing!) so that no Faith that wishes to contribute meaningfully to the Human Vision, can close itself off from those it is in relationship with. We may try to dictate the terms, but the Other dictates them to us. We need to be open to new understandings of language and culture, history and science, art and literature, and willing to offer ourselves to others being honest in our commitments, but at least willing to listen to the commitments of others. Only in relationship between two “Thous” can we speak and critique ourselves and others. Only as we expose ourselves to these currents in human experience can we expect to hear afresh the Word of God. God’s ways may be different to ours but they cannot be worse. God seeks that which enhances and sustains Life, that which creates unity out of the threads of diversity, that which finds amplification of understanding in what is learned from encounter with those who are different. We are not obliged to tolerate or endorse something because it is different. We are obliged to seek that which enriches and sustains life and I believe this will always involve the discipline of agape and grace, and the search for justice. But it may be in this time our focus in United and Uniting Churches, should be less on the organisational and institutional identity we have labelled ‘Church’ and more on the discover of that which transcends our words and embodies the Way of Life. It is time to put our energy into what Unites. I hope the UCC finds a place that will not simply allow Greta to continue her Ministry as an accredited UCC Minister, but positively welcomes her ministry, her care, her honesty, and her embodiment of Love. I remember a carpenter who met someone who impressed him once and he said in an era when there was no Church and no formally labelled Christians “You are not far from the Kingdom of Heaven” . Surely this ought to be good enough for us.
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